OK, so this alpha channel stuff is great, but it would be even more powerful if we could draw a greyscale mask and apply it to an icon state as that state's alpha layer. This would let people draw an rgb blob of color and use the alpha mask to essentially carve the shape out with transparency. It's a ton easier to separate these two when dealing with more than a few colors, and then just merge the mask with the color layer to produce a fully colored and anti-aliased image without Photoshop or fancy tools.

In order for this to work, though, something should be done about altering the alpha only in the icon editor, because right now, it also alters the rgb values. I'm not sure if that's intended behavior or not, but if it is, maybe calling the setting "alpha only" is a bit misleading. :/

Also, we really really need some palette control, even if it is only the first 256 colors. DM likes to fill up the palette with colors however it feels like, which isn't very easy to work with when you're trying to find one shade of green off from 10 shades of similar values. In 3.5, we could organize the colors so we knew where they were and could easily find the colors we needed. Now it changes the positions of the colors almost every time you alter an icon, this is very frustrating, and adds a lot of unnecessary hunting to an already arduous task.

Really? Because I tested it by drawing a white line in the alpha-only and switched back to the rgb+alpha mode to see that the line didn't just change the transparency, but also altered the existing colors I drew over with white. I'll try it out again later when I get home. It would be most excellent if it does alter only the alpha, since I can pixel push out really awesome icons with full anti-aliasing and such.

Really? Because I tested it by drawing a white line in the alpha-only and switched back to the rgb+alpha mode to see that the line didn't just change the transparency, but also altered the existing colors I drew over with white.

That shouldn't be the case- the idea behind the alpha editing is to allow you to change the transparency of the icon after the fact. I could swear I had that working, but that may have been years ago!

Anyway, we'll check it out (I am not in a position at the moment, but tommorow), and the pasting too.

S'truth! I just tested it just so I would be sure I wasn't hallucinating the other times I did it.

Here's what I did:

Draw a yellow rectangle.
Switch to Alpha only. The display now appears black and white.
Click on red in the palette, full opacity.
Draw on the rectangle.
Switch to RGB + alpha. The display still appears as a yellow rectangle.
Switch back to Alpha only.
Click on purple in the palette, 153/255 opacity.
Draw on the white rectangle. It appears to get darker where I drew.
Click on RGB + alpha.
The rectangle is still completely yellow, but now has a faded part where the grey shows through.

Uh... this has nothing to do with the topic. You're all way off base. :P Lummox JR was referring to pasting an alpha image into the icon editor in alpha-only mode, nothing to do with pasting over icons with alpha transparencies or the Blend() proc, which I must point out to you all dose not support semi-transparent blending, only full opacity or mask blending.